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Fall 2015 Gaming Battle Plan

I think it’s safe to say the fall gaming release season has started. People who have to review games are already talking about how we’re gonna get a major release every week from here through November (or even December). Metal Gear Solid V is out, and if I’m not mistaken we’ve passed or are quickly approaching the official first day of fall according to meteorologists. My plate of planned games to play is simultaneously light on quantity but stacked with fat releases.

Actually, my too biggest commitments for the fall are games I’m already playing: Metal Gear and The Witcher 3. After that I’m eventually going to get Fallout 4, and that might be it to be honest. Those three alone probably constitute enough game time for the whole season. I have no idea how many hours I’ve sunk into Witcher 3, and Metal Gear may very well become some insane 80+ hour commitment. Fallout is, well, a Bethesda game. Right now though my plans hinge on even being able to finish Metal Gear and The Witcher before Fallout drops. I don’t even know how the first Witcher 3 expansion (October 31st I think) is going to fit in here.

And I’m not really thinking about the storm of blockbuster first person shooter events this year: Halo 5, Call of Duty Black Ops 3, Star Wars Battlefront, and Rainbow Six Siege. When is the last time I even bought an FPS from any of those publishers?

The thing is, before I started Fallout 4, which before E3 I assumed was a 2016 game, I was planning to start another Fallout 3 character. I felt like I never really knew what I was doing with my initial one, and I never really got the chance to start a heavily modded game of Fallout 3 like I recently did Skyrim. If it comes down to it I might do this even after Fallout 4 comes out, as I don’t feel an absolute need to play that game on day one, only a need to play it eventually. That may also depend on when the mod tools come around. I don’t think I can play a completely vanilla Bethesda game anymore. I have to at least have a a user interface mod or something.

In between all this I hope to be able to shimmy in an indie game or two. Of all the ones I’ve been hoping to see over the last couple years a few came out (or are coming out very soon) but a lot of others got pushed back to 2016. From my 50-odd-game Steam wishlist I’d like to make time for Stasis and/or Odallus: The Dark Call. Maybe it might make sense to play the former alongside SOMA — two horror-themed space games, around Halloween. Chasm is still supposed to come out this year as well but it wouldn’t be surprised if it slipped. The same goes for Playdead’s Inside. My anticipated 2016 indie delays include Ghost Song, Hyper Light Drifter, and Cuphead. There’s no telling when we’ll see Routine, A.N.N.E, Song of Horror, or the upgraded version of Frogatto.

In December Square Enix also has two big games coming out that are in my “hope to check out when I have the money” bin: Hitman and Just Cause 3. So far this year we’ve already gotten two achievements in open-world video game making with Witcher 3 and Metal Gear, plus Bethesda’s making its step into this console generation, and people are still saying Just Cause 3 could be a dark horse for open-world games this winter. To be honest the five-year-old Just Cause 2 is still an impressive game today, so its sequel could very well impress even compared to the major 2015 hits.

Oh, and No Man’s Sky might still come out this year.

I could go either way on the predictions for that one. According to what Hello Games has said, some circumstances outside the developer’s control are affecting the announcement of a release date which is apparently already finalized. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 2016, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it still made it out this year. Actually, I’m gonna throw out a theory here: I think it’s possible Hello Games might just surprise launch No Man’s Sky one day. Maybe one day we could just wake up to see the game available on Steam and PlayStation Network.

A lot of the confusion surrounding the game stems from how Hello Games wants players to perceive it. There’s a sense we’ve already seen and heard more of it than Hello Games wants us to prior to release. Company head Sean Murray has compared No Man’s Sky to the kinds of survival games that simply show up on Steam Early Access and accrue word of mouth like Stranded Deep or ARK: Survival Evolved. Hello Games wants No Man’s Sky to be experience more similarly to those games than to any blockbuster event.